Days on market, listings and discounting: Queensland's market signals

In this article

Written by

Kooky

Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.

About Kooky and Shaka →

A price index tells you what homes were worth last month. It says little about why, and less about what is building up behind it. For that, analysts, agents and valuers watch a second set of numbers: how many homes are for sale, how long they take to sell, how far vendors come down from the advertised price, and how many sales are completed.

These measures appear in almost every market report on Queensland, often in one line each and usually without a definition. They are worth understanding because they tend to move before prices do, and because the same word can mean different things depending on who is counting. "Listings up 26.5 per cent" and "listings up 39.5 per cent" were both reported for Brisbane within the past few weeks, and neither is an error.

This guide sets out what each measure is, how the main publishers define it, and how to read them together. It covers Cotality, SQM Research, PropTrack and the Real Estate Institute of Queensland, and it uses their published definitions where those could be found. Where a publisher does not spell out a definition, the guide says so. The examples are Queensland figures from the winter of 2026.

Cotality figures for August 2026 as reported by Real Estate Business and in Cotality's Home Value Index release; SQM Research, Total Property Listings, August 2026.

Why look beyond the price

A sale price is the end of a process. A vendor decides to sell, an agent lists the home, buyers inspect, offers are made, a contract is signed and, weeks later, the sale is recorded. When conditions change, the early stages change first. Fewer buyers turn up, so homes sit longer. Vendors who need a result accept less than they asked. Only then do lower sale prices enter the data that price indexes are built from.

Cotality made the connection explicit in its Home Value Index release for August 2026, where it listed longer selling times, larger vendor discounts and persistently low auction clearance rates as the signs of a buyer's market. The index is the result; those measures are the evidence.

The table gives an overview of the measures this guide covers and who publishes them.

Listings: the count of homes for sale

A listing count answers a simple question: how much is there to choose from? The difficulty is in deciding what to count and over how long.

SQM Research publishes the clearest definition. On its listings pages it defines stock on market as the total number of residential properties, including land, advertised online during the month concerned. A property that was advertised and then withdrawn in the month is still counted. SQM gathers the figures by monitoring the major listings websites, removes duplicates where a home appears on more than one site, and leaves out advertisements that carry no address. It notes one limitation: properties in outer regional areas that are advertised only in print may be under-represented.

Two features of that definition shape how the number behaves. It covers a whole month, so a home that sold in the first week and one that sat unsold for the entire month each count once. And it includes land. A rising SQM total can therefore mean more people are selling, or that the same homes are selling more slowly, or both.

Cotality reports listings over a shorter window. Its releases describe the number of homes observed for sale over the four weeks to a given date, and compare that with the same four weeks a year earlier and with the average of the previous five years. In its August 2026 index release it said capital city listings over the four weeks to 30 August were 24 per cent higher than a year earlier and 8 per cent above the five-year average.

PropTrack is the research arm of REA Group, which operates realestate.com.au, and its listings figures are drawn from that site. Its monthly reports quote new listings and total listings for each capital and for regional areas. A count taken from one website will differ from a count taken across several, even when both are accurate.

New, older and distressed stock

The total hides what is happening inside it, which is why the better reports split it.

New listings are the homes that came to market in the period. They measure vendors' decisions. Total listings minus new listings is, roughly, the stock carried over from earlier, and it measures how fast buyers are absorbing what is offered.

The Brisbane figures for July 2026 show why the split matters. SQM counted 20,273 listings in the city, 18.0 per cent more than in June, yet new listings rose by only 4.8 per cent. The rise in the total came mainly from homes that had not sold. In August the pattern sharpened: SQM reported Brisbane's total up a further 0.5 per cent to 20,374, with new listings down 7.6 per cent and older listings up 13.8 per cent.

SQM reports older listings as a category of their own, covering stock that has been advertised for an extended period. A growing share of old stock is commonly read as a sign that asking prices are sitting above what buyers will pay.

Distressed listings are a narrower group, where a home is advertised as an urgent or forced sale. SQM counted 1,497 in Queensland in August 2026, up 25.3 per cent on a year earlier, out of 4,510 nationally. The figure is small beside the total stock, and it depends on how sellers choose to word their advertisements, so it is best read as a trend.

Days on market

Days on market is the time between a home being listed and being sold, and it is almost always quoted as a median: half of the homes that sold did so faster, half more slowly. A median is used because a handful of homes that take a year to sell would distort an average.

Cotality's reports give the figure for a period of three months. Its housing chart pack for October 2023, for example, said the median time to sell a property nationally in the September quarter of that year was 30 days. The figure reported for Brisbane in August 2026 was 28 days, against 19 days a year earlier.

REA Group uses its own version. It has described days on site as the amount of time a property is listed on realestate.com.au before selling. That is a measure of one website's advertisements, which is not quite the same as the time between the first advertisement anywhere and the contract.

The REIQ reports selling times in its quarterly data for Queensland. For the December quarter of 2024, for instance, it put the average sales campaign for houses at 21 days across Queensland and 20 days in Brisbane, with Rockhampton at 11 days and Noosa at 47. The spread between those two regions is a useful reminder that a state figure conceals very different local markets.

Three cautions apply to any days-on-market number. It describes only homes that sold, so the homes still waiting, which are the slowest, are not in it. It can restart if a property is withdrawn and listed again, depending on how the publisher treats relisting; none of the definitions read for this guide settles that point. And it lags: a home that sold after 28 days was listed four weeks before, in what may have been a different market.

Vendor discounting

The vendor discount measures how far the sale price fell short of the advertised price. It is the closest thing the data offer to a record of negotiation.

The definition used by Cotality, published when the firm traded as CoreLogic, is specific. The metric measures, for properties that sell below the initial list price, the difference between the original list price and the ultimate sale price, and it is calculated as a median across a rolling three months of data. In the chart pack for October 2023, the national median vendor discount was given as 3.8 per cent in the three months to September, down from 4.3 per cent at the end of the previous year.

Two more features limit what the measure can show. It needs an advertised price, so homes marketed without one, as auction properties generally are in Queensland, are unlikely to be captured. And it is anchored to the first price. A vendor who starts high and reduces twice will show a large discount; one who is priced to the market from the first day will show none, even if both homes sell for the same amount.

The REIQ has reported vendor discounts for Queensland for many years. Its figures for the September quarter of 2013, for example, showed the vendor discount in Brisbane falling over a year from 7.9 per cent to 6.5 per cent while days on market fell from 90 to 78. The two measures usually travel together, as they did then: when homes sell faster, vendors concede less.

Asking prices

An asking price series tracks the prices in advertisements, not in contracts. SQM Research publishes one each month alongside its listings count. In August 2026 it reported that combined asking prices in Brisbane fell 1.7 per cent over the month and stood 7.1 per cent higher than a year earlier, while the national figure eased 0.1 per cent.

The strength of the measure is speed. Vendors and agents can change an advertised price in a day, long before a sale is recorded, so asking prices show expectations shifting almost as it happens. The weakness is that an asking price is a hope. It includes homes that will never sell at that figure, and it excludes every home advertised without a price.

In the same month, the Cotality Home Value Index estimated that Brisbane dwelling values fell 1.0 per cent. The two figures measure different things, and should be neither added together nor averaged.

Sales volumes

The number of sales is the measure of demand that matters most and the one that arrives latest. Records of sales take time to reach the data providers, so the most recent months are the least complete. Cotality publishes estimates of recent sales and compares them with the previous year and the five-year average.

In its August 2026 release Cotality said sales volumes were tracking well below both of those benchmarks, with Brisbane, Perth and Sydney recording the largest falls and estimated sales down by more than 20 per cent. The REIQ's quarterly data give counts of sales by region, and the institute has described its latest sales numbers as preliminary when it publishes them.

Sales and listings are best read as a pair. Listings rising while sales fall is the combination that lengthens selling times. Listings falling while sales hold is the combination that shortens them.

Why two publishers give two numbers

Once the definitions are laid side by side, the disagreements in the headlines stop being puzzling.

The two listing figures differ in period, in the websites covered and possibly in whether land is included. The two selling times differ in geography: one is a city and the other is the whole country, and the reports of the valuation firm's figure read for this guide do not say which data set it used. None of the four is wrong. Each answers a slightly different question.

The practical rule is to compare like with like. Follow one publisher's series over time, and check three things before setting any figure beside another: the area, the period and the kind of property.

Reading the signals together: Queensland in winter 2026

The winter of 2026 gives a worked case of the measures moving in sequence.

In July, SQM's count of Brisbane listings jumped while new listings barely moved, which pointed to slower sales. In the same month the Cotality index recorded a fall of 0.6 per cent in Brisbane values, its second monthly fall after a May peak. In August the median selling time reached 28 days, nine days longer than a year before, asking prices fell 1.7 per cent, new listings dropped and the index fell a further 1.0 per cent.

The REIQ's quarterly medians, which cover April to June, showed only the faintest trace of this: a statewide house median down 0.91 per cent, with nine of the 16 major markets still recording soft growth. That is not a contradiction. The quarterly median looks backwards over three months of settled sales. The listings, selling times and asking prices describe the weeks in which the next quarter's sales were being negotiated.

A price is the last thing to change in a property market. By the time the index moves, the listings and the selling times have usually been saying so for weeks.

What the signals cannot do

These measures describe conditions. They do not forecast them. A long selling time says buyers have had the upper hand; it does not say they will keep it.

They are also blunt at small scale. A city-wide median hides the difference between suburbs, and in a single suburb a quarter may hold too few sales for a median to mean much. Seasons matter too: SQM remarked that July's rise in listings was unusual precisely because winter is normally a lull, and spring brings new campaigns in any year.

And they cannot replace the particulars of one home. A property that is well presented and sensibly priced can sell in a week in a slow market, and an overpriced one can sit for months in a fast one. What the signals offer a buyer, a seller or an agent is context: a way to tell whether an experience on one street matches what is happening across the city, and a reason to ask what a headline number is really counting.

Kooky, from Shaka

Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.

About Kooky and Shaka →